Gallery Two

The studio was enormous. Airy and open with an atrium feel to it, natural light flooding the main gallery floor through the windows on the ceiling, so spectacular in their massive design, they might have been works of art themselves. The staccato click of fashionable heels on the ebony hardwood floor echoed through the space at a steady clip, an under-beat to the drone of polite, and not-so-polite, conversation that hung in the air like smog.

I wandered along the perimeter of the room, at arm's length from the cluster of pretty people gathered in the center, watching and listening to the humming buzz of their collective nervous energy, outside looking in. With the not so minor exception of the multitude of mingling bodies, the room was empty. The twenty foot walls were painted a bright white, and the work we had all gathered to view very nearly screamed off of the stark backdrop, an unruly child begging for attention.

The art was as painful to look at, a withering internal glare the artist forced mercilessly upon herself; a train wreck of pain and destruction, twisted fear and mental instability, so hideous you couldn't take your eyes off it. Even when the gawking began to wrench knots in the spot where your neck greets your shoulders; even when finally seeing it for what it was bruised your eyes. Even when you realized what you were seeing was the bottomless pit of one woman's tattered, tortured, wilted soul, the lurid, hellish evidence left smattered and splattered on the wall for public consumption. Not one thing more, and not one single thing less.

My paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures are the visual diary of my life. Through personal metaphors I depict situations I have experienced. Or am anticipating.

- Erika Kymia Nawabi

I stared at the words on the small mounted card until I couldn't bear a full minute more of the piteous cries that wailed at me from the grotesque canvasses, the gallery walls no longer white and bright with promise to my untrained eyes, but mottled and stained with the remains of one woman's ugly truth.

My insides twisted, my face flushed hot, my hands shook. From disgust and fear. From devastating sadness and aimless pity. From anger, directed toward an vast unknown, so vile its metallic aftertaste stung my throat.

A woman laughed, in high pitched gaudy tones that jangled like a dinner bell in a room full of the starved. The room fell uncomfortably silent then, until a man cleared his throat, the sound echoing off the stark white walls, bouncing off the hardwood floors, rippling through the mingling masses like a secret signal: as you were.

But I wondered, as the whisper made its way through me, how any of us could ever be the same again.

Comments

[Nancy]

disturbing, unsettling art is hard - the message is often so important, the human situation - THIS human's situation - but in the course of shaking us, it risks shutting many out.

I've been getting an insider's glimpse on the processes that go on in selecting works for city commissioned public art displays, and I'm so surprised at how reactionary - read: afraid - many are about provacative art. The feeling is it's a fine line between provactive and incendiary.

[Paul is a Hermit]

I like that she used metaphors :)

Wherever you were, I need not go, because of you, I've already been. I love what lives inside you. What could bring this from you?
Thank you.

[Karen]

Art can change your life. If not so dramatic, at least your perspective.

[kenju]

Oooh, where was that?